Parasite of the Day

September 8, 2017

Some of you might have heard of the infamous parasitic barnacle Sacculina carcini which infects crabs and take over their bodies. These barnacles are true body-snatchers in every sense - they divert the host's resources for their own growth and reproduction, and by doing so they end up castrating their host. Additionally, some can also can alter their host's behaviour, making them unwitting babysitters for their eventual spawn.

(A) Shrimp infected with Sylon hippolytes; (B) Internal structure of infected shrimp show its nervous system (n) and the interna (i) and externa (e) of Sylon;(C) Close-up internal view; (D) Close-up internal view with colour-marking. Photos from Fig 2 of the paper

While it sounds like a gruesome fate for the host, parasitic castration is a very clever way for a parasite to get the most out of the host without killing it. While the host can no longer reproduce, and thus dead from a evolutionary perspective, it doesn't need its reproductive organ to stay alive, but instead it now serves as a walking life support system for the parasite - a walking dead. So just how big can these body snatchers get in comparison with their host?

Sacculina carcini and related parasites belong to a group of very unusual parasitic barnacles call Rhizocephala. Their bodies consist of a network of roots call the interna which wrap around the host's organs, and a bulbous reproductive organ call the externa which sticks out of the host's abdomen. In a previous post I wrote about a study which used micro-CT scans to look at how the these parasites' roots are distributed around the host's organs. In the study featured in this post, a group of scientists compared the anatomy of two different rhizocephalan species and how it relates to their reproductive strategies

The two species they compared were Sylon hippolytes which infects the shrimp Pandalina brevirostris, and Peltogaster (featured in a previous post on this blog) which infect hermit crabs. They collected specimens of both parasites (and their hosts), and prepared them for scanning. After putting the prepared specimens through the micro-CT scanner, they used special software to calculate the parasites' volume and were able to construct a 3D computer model of each parasite along with the internal anatomy of their hosts.

Additionally, they also counted the number of eggs produced by each parasite, and for both species, it seems bigger hosts means more parasite eggs. Both Peltogaster and Sylon grew to about the same size in proportion to their respective hosts (17.78% for Peltogaster, 18.07% for Sylon). But the key difference lies in how much of that mass is distributed between reproductive externa versus the interna root system in the host's body.

The shrimp-infecting Sylon devoted the bare minimum to its interna which is only about 2.5% of the volume of its externa. In contrast, the interna root system of the hermit crab-infecting Peltogaster was about one-fifth of the volume of its externa. So why is there such a massive difference between those two species since they parasitise the host in a similar way? The answer lies in their respective reproductive investments. The Sylon specimens measured in this study had about 1400 to over 22000 eggs, and to produce all those eggs Sylon has to devote a lot more of its mass to its reproductive tissue. In contrast, Peltogaster produced a comparative modest number of eggs, only 371 to 4580.

But why does Sylon put so much into egg production while leaving the bare minimum to the part of its body which is actually embedded in the host? The main reason is that Sylon only gets one shot at breeding - it only ever produce a single brood in its lifetime before it withers away, so it has to make the most of it by having a massive externa. In contrast, once Peltogaster becomes established in a host, it spawns repeatedly and grow a new externa each breeding season, and in order to do so, it needs to invest in a robust network of tendrils which will stay in the host for good.

In this sense, Sylon has a "YOLO" approach to host exploitation and reproduction, whereas Peltogaster is in it for the long haul and so devote more of itself to establishing an extensive root system inside the host. This also has important consequences for the host as well since both parasites places such a massive burden on their hosts - while the demanding presence of Sylon will eventually come to pass, Peltogaster is a persistent body-snatcher that's going to stick around for quite a while.

August 16, 2017

Snails are host to a wide range of parasites, especially parasitic flukes that turn snails into clone factories to pump out streams of parasite larvae. But there are species of snails which are parasites themselves, and many of them are parasites of echinoderms - the phylum of animal which includes the likes of seastars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers.

This post features Sabinella troglodytes - a parasitic snail found off the coast of Brazil which lives on the body of the slate pencil urchin Eucidaris tribuloides. The paper featured in this post presented a description of its life-cycle and other natural history observation of this gastropod. Parasites tend to be very specific about what part of their host's body they live on, and if there's one thing that sea urchins are known for, it is their spines, and that's what S. troglodytes feed and live on

Most molluscs have a rasping organ call a radula which they use while feeding to scrape away at their food. In the vampire snail this has been modified into something like a syringe which they can use to stab into a fish to drink their blood. In predatory whelks, the radula is used like a file to rasp away at the hard shell of their prey (usually another mollusc) to access the soft, gooey centre. But that is not how S. troglodytes feed on its sea urchin host. Unlike most of its gastropod relatives, S. troglodyte has lost its radula - so how can it bore into the spine of a sea urchin to reach its tasty core? Based on their observations, the researchers who conducted this study concluded S. troglodyte is secreting some kind of corrosive substance to eat through the tough walls of the spine in order to gain access to all that soft internal spine tissue.

But this parasitic snail is not content to simply just feed on the sea urchin, they also alter the urchin's spines to make it a more comfortable home. Sabinella troglodytes is one of many species of gall-forming snails that parasitise echinoderms. As their name indicates, the slate pencil urchin is covered in straight, pencil-shaped spines - but the spines housing S. troglodytes look almost like fattened tubers. Much like how gall-wasps can induce bulbous growths on their host trees, these gall-forming snails can cause growth abnormalities in the sea urchin's tissue. This is also somewhat comparable to Accacoelium contortum, a parasitic fluke that lives on the gills of ocean sunfish while wrapped in a cosy little flesh bag made out of the host's tissue.

It is currently unknown how S. troglodytes alters the sea urchin's spines, but it could be due to some other components in the snail's saliva - in addition to corrosive agent to erode the sea urchin's spine, it might also be spitting out growth factors that alters the tissue of the spine. In addition to being a cosy place to feed and hide from threats, these galls seem to be a bit of a love nest for S. troglodytes during the summer months. The researchers noted that between December and February, almost all the galls were mostly occupied by snail couples (consisting of a female and her smaller male mate) which have settled down to raise a brood of eggs. But for the rest of the year, the galls were filled with juvenile snails which had probably inherited the gall from their parents.

While the spines of many sea urchins are straight and narrow, they are not immune to tampering by the right parasite. Sabinella troglodytes shows that with a little biological renovation, one can turn even something like a sea urchin's spine into a cosy home suitable for raising a healthy brood.

July 27, 2017

Millipedes are known for secreting some really noxious chemicals to ward off its enemies. So much so that other animals are also known to co-opt the millipede's chemical cocktails for their own use.
For example lemurs and capuchin monkeys are known to smear millipede juice on themselves as a mosquito repellent. But there is no perfect defence and the millipede have some adversaries that are not deterred by its defensive secretion, some of which are phorid flies in the Myriophora genus - which are specialised millipede hunters.

Phoridae is a family of flies also known as "scuttle flies" - they are mostly parasitoids and there are thousands of species found all over the world. Some species are well-known for their ant-decapitation trick. Despite being rather common, very little is known about most of these parasitoids - this is possibly because of the daunting number of species, their small size, and general lack of research interest beyond a handful of species which either have potential as a mean of biological control, or are pest of cultivated insects like bees.

With so many different species of phorids out there, perhaps it is not surprising that they have evolved to target a wide range of terrestrial invertebrates - and some of them specialised in hunting millipedes, undeterred by their chemical defences. So how do Myriophora flies track down their millipede hosts? To find out, a group of researchers conducted a series of experiments at a research station in Costa Rica to determine what it is about millipedes that these flies find so attractive. They wanted to figure out whether it is the defensive juices secreted by the millipedes or the sight of the millipedes themselves. So they collected some millipedes, kept them for a few days to ensure they're parasitoid free to start with, and used them to set up an experiment in luring phorid flies.

They end up presenting the flies with the following: (1) millipede juice dabbed on pieces of paper (which they obtain by lightly zapping the millipedes), (2) dead millipede smeared in millipede juice, and (3) millipedes which have been cleared of any millipede juice by zapping them until they run out of defensive secretions.

They found that the Myriophora flies were rather attracted to paper cards dabbed with millipede juice and millipedes that were smeared with their own defensive secretions. In contrast, the flies completely ignored perfectly intact millipedes that were completely juiced out. So it seems that the scent of a millipede is far more important than the sight of one for these flies.

So not only are Myriphora not deterred by the millipede's noxious chemicals, they are actually attracted to it. But millipede juice is a complex chemical cocktail - which is the exact compound that the flies are homing in on? After further analysis, the researchers determined that the compound in millipede juice most responsible for attracted these parasitoids is a chemical called 2-methoxy-3-methyl-1,4-benzoquinone. That alone was enough to bring the flies to the yard. But when that is combined with another compound found in millipede juice called 2-methyl-1,4-benzoquinone, this cocktail was three times more attractive to Myriophora flies than that first compound by itself.

But a millipede is a well-protected target - even if you can get past its noxious secretions, it also has some formidable armour platings. But there are gaps in its armoured segments and Myriophora has a specialist weapon to exploit those gaps. This parasitoid fly has an ovipositor which is shaped somewhat like a thin stiletto - when it lands on a millipede, Myriophora stabs its ovipositor at spots like the base of the antenna, the gap between the head and the rest of the body, the vulnerable underbelly of the body segment, or between the plates covering the millipede's butt.

The parasitoid sticks its ovipositor between those gaps in the millipede's armour, and delivers a deadly payload in the form of an egg. Once the egg hatches inside the millipede, the newborn maggot has a hearty appetite and a growth rate to match. Within five days, it will finish cleaning out the millipede host from the inside, leaving behind only an empty husk and the millipede's hindgut. The maggot will then crawl from its host's empty corpse to pupate and eventually emerge as an adult fly, ready to bring up a new generation of millipede-wreckers

So for the millipedes, while those defensive cocktails are great for fending off everything else, there is no perfect defence - the very thing that protects it against some many predators is also the very thing that brings in parasitoid flies that will eat them alive.

July 10, 2017

Tapeworms are a very diverse group of parasitic worms. There are about 6000 described species and they infect a wide range of different vertebrate animals including fish, amphibians, mammals, reptiles, and birds. But even though there are so many different tapeworm species, the one thing they all have in common is that the adult worm lives in the intestine of their vertebrate host. So it would be no surprise that a large animal like an elephant would be host to tapeworms, and the species that is featured in the study that we will be covering in this blog post is Anoplocephala manubriata.

Despite being an elephant parasite, these tapeworms are not as big as you might think. Many people think that big host means big parasites, and while some parasites in large animals can reach massive sizes, but that is not always the case. Instead of being infected by big parasites, many large animals are often host to parasites that are not much bigger than related species infecting smaller hosts.

For example, the Great White Shark is infected by a species of tiny tapeworm which measures just a few millimetres long, but what they lack in size they make up for in numbers, and a single shark can be infected by thousands of them. While A. manubriata grows to a respectable size for a tapeworm (4.6 cm–7.4 cm long and 0.7 cm to 1.8 cm wide), it is nowhere near the size of the infamous broad fish tapeworm which can reach the alarming length of over 10 metres long.

The tapeworms described in this study were retrieved from a young male elephant that died at the Udawalawe Elephant Transit Home in Sri Lanka. Anoplocephala manubriata has very muscular suckers on its scolex which allows it to keep a firm grip on the host intestinal wall. But this is not so great for the elephant - the suction from the tapeworms' suckers essentially end up leaving hickeys on the elephant's intestinal mucosa, which is not a particularly healthy place for an elephant to get love bites, especially if they have been left there by a bunch of tapeworms. Indeed, the elephant that was necropsied in this study was found to have multiple lesions and ulcers on the gut lining as a result of these parasitic love bites. This tapeworm seems to be far more common among younger elephants than adults, possibly because older elephants have more developed immune systems, and have build up some kind of resistant towards these parasites.

Tapeworms have complex life-cycles, and before the adult worm ends up in the intestine of the final host, they have to first develop as larval stages in smaller animals - usually an invertebrate, in some case a small vertebrate animal - and these small animals are usually the prey species of the final host. That is why the final host for many species of tapeworms are often predatory animals or at least animals that include smaller animals in their diet. But what about elephants though? They are not usually known for eating bugs or other small animals, and the other tapeworms in the Anoplocephala genus are parasites that infect horses, zebras, and rhinoceros - all herbivorous mammals. So how does A. manubriata finds its way into these giant herbivorous animals?

A previous study found that A. manubriata actually uses orbatid mites as an intermediate host. Orbatid mites are minuscule arachnids that live among soil and litters - they are very tiny, and most species are less than one millimetre long. But being so tiny means that the elephant can easily swallow them inadvertently along with their usual fodder. Branches and leaves that have been in contact with soil can inadvertently pick up some of these tiny mites, and at least a few of those would be infected with A. manubriata larvae. But there is also another way through which elephant can end up with A. manubriata. Elephants that have gastrointestinal problems also have a habit of eating dirt, possibly as a way of self-medication, as seen in other animal. However, while trying to cure themselves of one ill, they end up ingesting soil mites and inflicting another different ill upon themselves.

Like many parasites, A. manubriata is a key part of the ecosystem, and the life-cycle of this tapeworm, which involves both the elephants and soil mites, reveals the hidden ecological connection between one of the planet's largest living land animal and one of its smallest.

June 16, 2017

Mind-controlling fungi that manipulate ants have become quite well-know among the general public due to their ability to induce a "zombie-like" state in their host, but ants are not the only insects that can get infected by fungi, nor are they the only insects to get mind controlled by them. The study featured in this post is about a zombie beetle fungus call Eryniopsis lampyridarum which infects the goldenrod soldier beetle. Despite its name, the goldenrod soldier beetle is not as formidable as its name might indicate. The name is actually based on the first described soldier beetle species which has a colour pattern that resembles the coat of 17th-19th century British soldiers.

The presence of E. lampyridarum in these beetles has been known for over a century, but relatively little research has been conducted on this pairing aside from some basic ecological research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. It was not until now that someone has investigated this parasite-host interaction in close details, and provide descriptions of the fungal structure

When the fungal infection in a beetle ripens, the infected insect will seek out a flower and clamp their mandibles around it in a vice-like grip. This is rather reminiscent of some zombie ant fungi which cause their hosts to position themselves on the underside of leaves where they can sprinkle spores into the path of uninfected ants. But the zombie beetles don't clamp themselves to leaves, nor do they bite down on just any old flowers, they only chose those from the Asteraceae - better known as daisies. After biting down on a daisy, the infected beetle succumbs to the infection. But the fungus is not done with its host quite yet.

Slowly, the dead beetle's wing covers and wings unfurl throughout the night, revealing a bloated abdomen brimming with fungal growth. By dawn the wings and their covers are full extended. So why have daisies as the final resting place for these zombie beetles? Also why unfold the wings and their covers at night just before daybreak?

For soldier beetles daisies, are like pubs or cafe - that's where they congregate to feed and possibly socialise with other beetles. So by placing itself on a flower, the zombie beetle is in prime position to meet its uninfected cousins. Unlike the zombie ant fungus which sprinkle its spores onto the ground to infect foraging worker ants, the spores of E. lampyridarum stays on the zombie beetle because that's where uninfected beetles are likely to come into contact with them.

With the fungal bodies sprouting from the abdomen, it seems that unfolding the wings would help expose the infective spores to potential host. However, there might be another reason for the wings to be unfolded. The researchers of this study suggested it actually serves the function of making the fungus-ridden corpse more attractive to uninfected beetles. Having the zombie beetle's wings open just before daybreak is also tailored to suit the daily routine of these beetles which are more likely to visit daisies in the morning. You can imagine that an unsuspecting goldenrod soldier beetle would visit a flower for a drink in the morning, meet some attractive looking beetles while it is there, only to end up with a fungal infection that will eventually take over them in body and mind

While some degree of mind-control is involved in getting the beetles to bite down on flowers, unfolding the wings seems to be a purely mechanical process. The wing unfolds long after the host has died, but the fungal growth propagate in such a way that it pushes the connective tissue at base of the beetle's wings and forces them to unfold. The fungus acts like the hand in a puppet, animating the beetle's dead body as if it is some kind of chitinous marionette.

But not all the infected beetles eventually become flower-clampers, some infected beetles simply die without ever climbing onto or clamping onto a daisy. In that case, the beetle are filled with thousands of resting spores, which unlike the ones on the zombie beetles, are not immediately infective. But those spores can last for a long time in the environment. For those beetles, when their bodies hit the ground and are broken apart by scavengers and microbes, they end up seeding the soil with a bank of viable spores.

So whereas the purpose of the infective spores on those flower-clamping zombie beetle is to spread the infection far and wide in the moment, those resting spores are an investment for the future - they are hardy and resistant, and their purpose is to wait in the soil for the next season, when they will unleash a brand new wave of zombifying plague.

June 4, 2017

Earlier this year, I wrote a post about Heterorhabditis bacteriophora; an insect-killing nematodes that uses bacterial symbionts to kill its host and turning its innards into a nutritious soup. But H. bacteriophora and its kin in the Heterorhabditidae family are not the only nematodes that have adopted the insect-killing life. Another family of roundworms, the Steinernematidae, have also independently formed their own insect-killing partnership with bacteria. The study featured in this post focuses on Steinernema carpocapsae - like the heterorhabditids, this parasite uses its bacterial symbionts as a weapon by unleashing them in the insects that they infiltrate. But this new study shows that there's more to those worms than just a bacteria delivery vehicle.

Steinernema carpocapsea larva in its free-living phase (left), and its infective/parasitic phase (right)
Photos from Fig 1 of the paper

Steinernema carpocapsae is an extremely capable killer, so much so that a single S. carpocapsae larva (which is only only about half a millimetre long) is enough to bring down an insect and turn it into an incubator for thousands of newly spawned worms. This parasite's bacterial partner in crime is Xenorhabdus nematophila, a bacteria which are found exclusively with S. carpocapsae and are responsible for producing the insecticidal toxins.

For the average insect, a lethal dose of X. nematophilus consists of about 3500 bacterial cells. But, each S. carpocapsae only carries 20—200 cells of X. nematophila - well below the lethal dose. The fact that a single worm is enough to kill an insect host with so few bacterial cells means that S. carpocapsae isn't just relying on the bacteria to do all the dirty work.

When a newly spawned S. carprocapsae crawls out of an insect carcass into the outside world, they look like just another nondescript soil nematode. They do not feed during that stage, so their mouth and guts are sealed shut. But when a S. carpocapsae larva encounters a suitable host, its body starts changing - its head swells up, its mouth opens, and its gut expands (see the photos above). It's like going through puberty, except instead of getting acne on your face or have hair sprout from certain places, or your voice changes, S. caprocapsae turns from a seemingly innocuous worm into a lean, mean parasitic killer.

But aside from such physical changes, these infective larvae also start spewing out a complex cocktail of proteins. When researchers isolated and examined this mixture more closely, they found that it was made up of 472 different proteins - many of them are proteases, which are digestive enzymes that breaks down proteins and cellular structures. There are also some peptide toxins similar to those found in other parasitic nematodes, but the functions of the vast majority of those molecule are unknown. And it turns out this cocktail can be quite toxic for insects. Fruitflies that are injected with S. carpocapsea toxins die within two to six hours, and it proved equally deadly for silkworms. Waxwmoth larvae fared a little better - while the toxins left them paralysed, they were able to recover after 24 hours, though a bit battered and bruised from the experience.

As deadly that might seem, based on the outcome of the lab experiments, it would take 20 parasite larvae about 24 hours to produce enough toxin to kill a fruitfly - which is a far cry from what goes on in the wild where a single S. carpocapsae can take down insects larger than fruitflies within two to three days. This nematode cocktail also expires pretty quickly, and completely loses its killing power after 54 hours.

However, we have to keep in mind that the proteins S. carpocapsea produces are not acting alone. Despite the parasite's toxic arsenal, its symbiotic bacteria still plays a very important role in killing the insect host. Also of the hundred of proteins that that S. carpocapsea secretes, not all of them contribute to the insect-killing process through sheer toxicity, some might work in conjunction with some of the bacteria's own toxins to boost their lethality. Some might be running interferences that suppress the host's immune system, which is a distinct possibility given their similarity to the peptide toxin secreted by other parasitic nematodes.

Understanding how all these proteins work, and how they function with S. carpocapsae's bacterial symbionts would require further investigation. With its arsenal of toxins and deadly bacterial symbiont, S. carpocapsae is the stuff of nightmares for insects in the undergrowth. But it may also give us insight into how parasitic nematodes overcome or subvert their host's defences, and how animal-microbe symbioses function in their respective environments.

May 16, 2017

Parasitic plants are important parts of many ecosystems due to the wide range of organisms they interact with. While they can be detrimental to the host plant's growth and reproduction, they are also a food source for many animals. For most parasitic plants very little is known about their basic natural history, let alone the impact they have on the surrounding environment. In the paper featured in this post, a group of researchers conducted a study to collect some much-needed basic natural history information on a common but poorly known parasitic plant call Langsdorffia hypogaea at the Panga Ecological Station, a cerrado reserve located 30 km south of Uberlândia in southeastern Brazil.

Langsdorffia hypogaea is a widespread parasitic plant found in Central and South America. It has been recorded to parasitise at least 23 different plant species, ranging from lianas, trees, and even a species of cactus. In this study, the researchers found it parasitising five different plant species at the cerrado reserve, with Miconia albicans, also known as Canela de velho, being the most commonly used host plant. It is not easy to spot the parasite's presence - it spends most of its life hidden underground as a parasitic tuber attached to its host's roots, and the parasitised plants do not look visibly different from its non-parasitised cousins.

Unlike hemiparasitic plants such as mistletoes which have leaves and are able to photosynthesis on their own, holoparasitic plants, such L. hypogaea, are wholly dependent upon their host and do not have much in the way of external structures. The only parts of L. hypogaea that poke out of the ground are its red, mushroom-like flowers, which only appear during the dry seasons. So even though it is fairly common, unless you know what to look for, you won't even know that it is there. This is probably why very little is known about it aside from description of its anatomy and the list of plants that it parasitises. Until this and similar studies came along, the most comprehensive research on the natural history of L. hypogaea was published over a century ago.

Since even though it is a parasite, L. hypogaea is still a flowering plant - so what pollinates it?
In New Zealand, an endangered species of parasitic plant called the wood rose (Dactylanthus taylorii) is pollinated by short-tailed bats. In this study, the research team found that the mushroom-shaped flowers of L. hypogaea were visited by a variety of insects ranging from ants, to wasps, to cockroaches. Unlike the wood rose, which produces a prodigious amount of concentrated nectar, L. hypogaea skims on the sugar and secretes a relatively dilute nectar. It is enough to attract many insects, but those insects might not be the plant's main pollinators. Judging from the flower's structure, the research team proposed that the main pollinators of L. hypogaea are more likely to be larger animals like small mammals or birds.

To find out what pollinates L. hypohaea, the researchers set up infrared-based camera traps near its flowers, and the resulting footage revealed a surprising nocturnal visitor - the white-naped jay (Cyanocorax cyanopogon). Aside from insects, those birds were the only animals seen to visit the flowers of this parasitic plant. At this point, it is not known how important the white-naped jays are as pollinators comparing with all the other animals that visit the flowers of L. hypogaea. Indeed, there is still much which are unknown about this parasitic plant, such as how its seeds are distributed, how it infects the hosts, what effects it might have on their host, and the kind of interactions it might have with the rest of the organisms in the ecosystem.

Organisms which are not well-studied, especially parasites, are not necessarily rare or exotic - they can be fairly common, but because they are hidden out of sight and they are also not on our mind. But to overlook parasitic plants such as L. hypogaeae is to ignore some of nature's most intimate connections and the impact they have on the nature world.

April 28, 2017

Bat fliesare ectoparasites that cling to bats and suck their blood. As their name indicates, they are actually flies, but their bodies have been so heavily modified for their parasitic life style that they are barely recognisable as such. Many of them look like spiders with their long crawling legs which allow them to climb all over a bat's furry coat, and some species have even lost their wings. They can be very picky about what species of bat they parasitise, and most bat flies are specialists that are only found on one or two bat species. While they are a pest to bats, these bat flies also have their own ectoparasites to deal with, in the form of a group of fungi, and this post is on a study which examined some of them.

These fungi belong to a group call Laboulbeniales, and are more commonly known as the "labouls". The live on the cuticle of their hosts and are not as invasive as other insect-infecting fungi. Labouls are found on a variety of different terrestrial arthropods including mites, millipedes and insects, but most species of labouls are found on beetles - which is to be expected somewhat since most species of terrestrial arthropods are beetles.

Labouls that infect bat flies have been found all over the world, but they in the environment where they do occur, they are relatively rare. In one study, scientists screened over 2500 bat flies and found only 56 laboul-infected flies. In Europe, there are four species of labouls that live on bat flies, all of them belong to the genus Arthrorhynchus. The fungi described in this study came from bat flies which lived on bats in the mountainous region of Hungary and parts of Romania. The samples were collected as a part of a long term bat surveys which took place between 1998 to 2015.

During the course of the survey, researchers caught bats with mist nets which were placed close to roosting sites. The bats that they caught were inspected for bat flies, and then released right after the researchers finished picking off their bat flies. They end up screening 1594 bats and collected a total of 1494 bat flies. Most of the bat flies the researchers collected were free from labouls, and of the eleven bat fly species they came across, only three were hosting labouls from two species - Arthrorhynchus eucampsipodae and Arthrorhynchus nycteribiae. The most commonly infected bat fly was the spider-look-alike bat fly Penicillidia conspicua - about a quarter of all the P. conspicua they found were infected with A. nycteribiae, and they seem to be the preferred host for that fungus.

Regardless of host fly species, the laboul fungi have an overwhelming preference for infecting female flies. This might be due to female flies simply being better hosts for the fungi - they live for longer than male flies (which gives them more opportunity to pick up laboul infections), they grow bigger, and have higher fat reserves (especially during pregnancy - yes, bat flies get pregnant), all of which makes them better hosts for the labouls than male bat flies.

There is still much that we do not known about these ectoparasites of ectoparasites - do all the bat fly labouls have a single common ancestor that initially jumped onto bat flies from some other insect host, then diversified into different species? Or did the different laboul species independently colonised bat flies on their own? Given mixed species roosts are pretty common among bats, how does this affect the transmission and evolution of these fungi on the bat flies? Additional do the labouls affect the interactions between the bat flies and their hosts?

Parasites can themselves become parasitised. Even on the backs of flies that live on the backs of bats, there is an undiscovered world of biological diversity - and we have barely scratched its surface.

April 15, 2017

Sea turtles have a lot of different parasites infecting them - in a previous post I wrote about a recently published study on a parasitic copepod that eats sea turtle skin. But as well as external parasites, turtles are also infected by a range of internal parasites, many of which are digenean flukes, but the ones that cause the most harm are the blood flukes. While most parasitic flukes that infect turtles live in the intestine and cause relatively little harm unless they occur in large numbers, blood flukes, as their name indicates, live in the circulatory system.

Top: shell of the worm snail Thylaeodus rugulosus, Bottom: cercaria of Amphiorchis sp.Photo from Fig. 1. of the paper

Infection by these blood flukes can cause a range of disease symptoms, but by far the main source of grief to their reptilian host comes from the eggs they lay in the hundreds and thousands. These microscopic eggs get circulated in the turtle's blood vessels and many of them become lodged in various parts of the turtle's body where they can cause damage to the surrounding tissue as they triggered the body's immune response. Infected turtles often have internal lesions throughout their tissue and various organs.

But how these flukes get into the turtles in the first place has long been a mystery. Like other digenean trematode flukes, blood flukes require some kind of invertebrate host - usually a snail - in which they undergo asexual/clonal reproduction to produce free-swimming larval stages call cercariae (which is the stage that infects the turtle). But there are many different species of snails in the sea, which species is/are the one(s) pumping out those turtle parasites? It is like looking for a needle in a haystack in a bigger haystack which is the size of an iceberg.

Recently, a group of very sick loggerhead turtles presented an opportunity to find out more about the life-cycle of these blood flukes. At the Sea Turtle Rescue Centre (ARCA del Mar) (which was where the study described in the previous post took place). Some juvenile turtles were exhibiting symptoms that matched those caused by blood fluke infections and it seems that they were infected by a species of fluke from the Amphiorchis genus. So how were they getting infected? The water supply at the facility is semi-closed and pre-treated to remove any contaminants - so the turtles must be getting infected by cercariae which were coming from inside the facility.

The silver lining to all this was that it was a great opportunity to work out what Amphiorchis is using as a first host to produce clonal larvae. As mentioned above, for most species of flukes, this is usually a snail, and there is only one species of snail living in the facility - worm snails that were encrusting on pipes that delivered water to the facility. Dissection of some specimens confirmed that those snails were filled with the asexual stages of Amphiorchis and thus the source of infection.

The worm snail is a peculiar family of snails call Vermetidae. Unlike other snails, this family of tube-shaped molluscs have evolved to live like tube worms or barnacles by cementing themselves to a hard surface, and casting out a sticky mucus net to haul in microalga, zooplankton, or anything else that gets caught in its snot web (see this video here). This might explain why some sea turtles end up getting such a heavy infections out in the wild. Worm snails are abundant on reefs, or form part of reefs themselves, and sea turtles often hang out around such habitats.

Furthermore, the turtle's shell also happens to be a good surfaces for these snail to stick to - while few encrusting snails in themselves usually wouldn't cause much problem to a sea turtle, if they are infected with Amphiorchis or other blood flukes, these snails get converted into little parasite factories that pumps out a stream of turtle-infecting larvae - and what better host for those tiny, short-lived cercariae to infect than the turtle that the host snail is already encrusted on?

March 25, 2017

At some stage of their lives, parasites need to move from one host to another - some move around a lot throughout their lives, staying just briefly on a given host before moving onto another. While others only do it once during their larval stage - once they reach their host, they are there for life. Either way, they still need to make a perilous journey to their host.

Top right: newly hatched nauplii, Top left: Copedpodite V stage, Bottom: Adult female with eggsImage composited from photos from Fig.1, 5, and 6. of the paper

This post is about study on Balaenophilus manatorum - a tiny parasitic copepod that lives on sea turtles. How does a tiny crustacean like that manage to find their way onto a turtle in the wide expanse of the sea? Do they jump on board when the turtle come into contact with each other, or can the larval stage swim on their own? Obviously they have managed to find a way because this copepod is very common among the juvenile loggerheads in the western Mediterranean, with over 80 percent of loggerhead turtles infected with B. manatorum. Given how small they are (the adult copepod is only about a millimetre long), it seems as if they would be barely a nuisance to their host. But when they occur in large numbers, they can be an serious menace. And they seem to have a very particular taste. It was thought that B. manatorum feed mostly (if not exclusively) on sea turtle skin.

To find out more about how B. manatorum infect their hosts and what they feed on, a team of scientists did a series of studies on some B. manatorum which were removed from a batch of sea turtle hatchlings. These hatchlings were being reared at the Sea Turtle Rescue Centre (ARCA del Mar) - a rescue and rehabilitation for sea turtles in Spain. They came from a brood of eggs that was removed from a beach frequent by tourist to ensure their safety, but during their stay at the centre, many of them develop symptoms of infestation by B. manatorum, each of them infected with about 300 B. manatorum and one unlucky turtle was hosting over 1400 copepods. While removing the copepods from the turtles, the research team collected some of the egg-bearing female copepods that were on the turtles, and reared them until their eggs hatched into larvae for the further study.

In the feeding trials, the copepods were offered a menu selection consisting of: flakes from the baleen plates of a fin whale, fish skin (from a blue whiting), green alga, loggerhead turtle skin flakes (from some hatchlings that had succumbed to B. manatorum infestation). All those items were dyed with a stain to track if they get ingested. They confirmed that these copepod only ate turtle skin flakes and didn't touch the other items on the menu. Other species of Balaenophilus have been recorded from the baleen plates of whales, but B. manatorum feed exclusively on turtle skin. From the moment it is born, B. manatorum is equipped with mouthparts which are well-suited for scrapping flakes from hard flat surfaces, such as the skin of a turtle. So it is no wonder heavy infestations of B. manatorum can cause severe lesions and skin erosions in turtles, especially for the more vulnerable hatchlings

But B. manatorum still need to reach the turtle in the first place. When placed in a dish of seawater, newly hatched copepods (called nauplii) seemed rather helpless, only able to crawl around. But if they manage to survive to grow into the subsequent stages called copepodite, they will develop legs that would allow them to swim for a bit - just barely, and once they grow past a stage call Copepodite IV, they can swim well enough to reach another turtle on their own. It seems that this parasite relies mostly on the social behaviour of the turtle for transmission. Newly hatched B. manatorum nauplii cannot swim and would have to wait for the turtles to touch each other (for example during mating) to climb onboard another host (rather like how human lice are transmitted), whereas the copepodites and adults can just swim across if another turtle comes close enough

Therefore, these parasitic copepods may present as a kind of social cost to these turtles, since not only is a social communicable parasite, it can also be a sexually transmitted infection. For B. manatorum, their entire world really is found on the back of a turtle.

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Why Parasite of the Day? (If it's not every day...)

The United Nations declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. In celebration of the enormous diversity of parasites and to highlight their importance, we created this blog, which showcased a species of parasite every day. Now that 2010 is over, we will continue to add more parasites from time to time, and write about any newly published research on parasite species that we have posted about yet.

See this post from the start of 2011 where we discuss the sheer scale of parasite biodiversity, and this post from the end of 2011 pretty much summarizes the mission of this blog.

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